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Access blocking

Introduction

The distribution of child sexual abuse material on the Internet is a huge problem, both for international law enforcement and for the victims of the depicted abuse.

The strategy of blocking access to child sexual abuse material has been operating in several countries for many years, with very good results. However, an international initiative is necessary, given the global nature of the Internet and the fact that some countries may have difficulties introducing such national blocking, due to a lack of legislation, personnel, technical equipment, and so on.

The "Worst of"-list

INTERPOL has taken responsibility for providing a list of domains containing child sexual abuse content to any (Internet) Access Service Provider (ASP) willing to participate in reducing the availability of such material on the Web.

INTERPOL's "Worst of"-list includes those domains that contain the most severe child sexual abuse material, according to ﻿defined criteria.

Participation is free of charge and completely voluntary, and will see Internet traffic redirected away from child sexual abuse material to a "stop page" hosted on an ASP server. The "stop page" will provide a mechanism for ﻿complaints about the blocking of a domain.

Working in partnership

INTERPOL is a member of the COSPOL Internet Related Child Abusive Material Project (﻿CIRCAMP). This is a European police collaboration project, in which access blocking is promoted as a crime prevention tool. The primary goals of CIRCAMP are to detect, disrupt and dismantle networks, organizations or structures used for the production and/or distribution of child abusive files, to identify children and to stop abuse